Sitting snug in a mid-city neighborhood just off Tulane Ave and Carrollton, near the southern terminus of Highway 61, Lisa Nelson, better known as Queen Trini Lisa, is dishing out some of the best Caribbean food in New Orleans.
But rewind just a few years back. Lisa was running a small corner store in the Ninth Ward, serving classic New Orleans takeaways like po’boys, fried chicken, and simple plate lunches. In the backroom, she would cook food from her home country of Trinidad and Tobago for her children, the smells wafting through the closed doors into the front of the shop. Soon, her customers began asking to buy her children’s food.
“It was weird and I thought, this is nothing special… Why do they want this?” Nelson says with a laugh. So she started selling curries and jerk chicken a few days a week.
“People would pop their head in and ask what I was cooking,” Nelson says. “If it wasn’t something from my home, they would say okay, see you tomorrow and leave. I started to realize that more people came to the shop when I cooked my food.”
After leaving the corner store, Nelson did pop-ups around the city, garnering a name for herself amidst a burgeoning interest in the foods that created what we now know as classic New Orleans cuisine—the Caribbean and African influences ignored by chefs and diners alike for so long.
Nelson’s name is now mentioned alongside other local luminaries like Nina Compton and chef Serigne Mbaye, making her part of an important conversation happening around New Orleans cuisines and its deep roots around the world. Now, at her own space in mid-city, she can usually be found in the kitchen, surrounded by rising dough, simmering curries, chopped cabbage, steaming rice, and several family members.
The doubles—creamy chickpeas redolent in warm Indian spices and served on airy, chewy fried flatbreads, two to a serving—are a standout hit alongside her coco bread fish sandwich and award-winning jerk chicken. It’s hard to go wrong here, so have a seat outside, take a recommendation or two, and savor every bite.